1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate generally to the ability of widgets to communicate with other widgets and dynamically build their content based on the communication.
2. Description of Related Art
As is known in the art, widgets (also known as gadgets, badges, modules, etc.) offer a simple and easy way for end users to embed various third-party functionality into their web pages, onto their computers, and even onto their mobile devices, including mobile phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), etc. Widgets may be used to display most anything and examples include modules that show the weather forecast for a particular city or the current stock price of a certain company, etc. The inclusion of a widget in a web page can be accomplished through a JavaScript™ call, an IFRAME element, an EMBED element, or any of a host of other methods which bring the widget code into the web page, where it runs locally within the user's browser (or on a user's desktop, etc.). While the widget code can consist entirely of HyperText Markup Language (HTML), widgets are more commonly developed either in JavaScript™ or Adobe® Flash®.
Traditionally, the content displayed by widgets has been fairly static and is generally limited to data which has been informed by a user's initial input when configuring the widget (e.g., telling a widget that displays weather information to display information related to Orlando, Fla., etc). Moreover, widgets have been generally independent from each other and cannot share content. For example, Yahoo!™ Finance offers a customizable widget for displaying financial information, which can include stock quotes. If a user decides he wants the widget to show stock quotes for a certain stock, he tells the widget which stock he is interested in and from that point on it will display those stock quotes. The widget will display only those stock quotes until the user tells it to display something else; the widget is informed only by the last settings that the user has provided.
Thus, it would be desirable to enable widgets to share information between them and use that information to inform their content. It would also be desirable to control when the widget actually appears on a web page or desktop so that it does not take up valuable space when it is not needed or desired.